we are arck » elgg

Arckventures in Elgg Dev #1: Extending the profile manager plugin with roles.

Paul — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:20:12 +0000

This is the first in a series of articles that Arck’s crew will create on a semi-regular basis. Our intention is to share our experiences customizing the popular open-source platform Elgg, both in terms of UI, functionality and integration.

We begin with Profile Manager. Profile Manager by ColdTrick is arguably one of the most useful and most used GPL plugins for Elgg. Versatile, user-friendly and well engineered, this plugin provides a unique profile management framework, which is much needed by many Elgg-powered sites.

Shortly after the release of Arck’s Roles framework, it was clear to all that there is a necessity to ‘marry’ these two independent frameworks. The goals was to make Profile Manager aware of existing user roles, so that site administrators could manage and create role-specific profile types with corresponding categories and profile fields.

At its present state the bridge plugin creates a seamless synchronisation of roles and profile types. Changes in profile types trigger a change in user’s role, and vice versa. While the roles framework, mainly concentrates on permissions of logged in users, the bridge allows to control what information is rendered based on the profile owner.

With some minor extensions this allows an novice administrator to greatly improve the registration experience, where specific sets of fields can be required for various roles. For example you wouldn’t want to request ‘Years of teaching experience’ from a user registering as a student, and you wouldn’t want to ask Professors for their ‘Current year of Bachelor’s studies’.

Arck’s “roles” and role-enabled “profile manager” plugins are GPL’d and available for download on our Elgg community profile, here:

http://community.elgg.org/pg/profile/arckinteractive

Written by: Ismayil Khayredinov

We’re helping to bring democracy, technology and Elgg to Angola!

Paul — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:19:15 +0000

We’ve partnered with the leaders of Angola’s first democratic opposition party to brand, design and develop a social network that will allow the party to elect candidates, vote on issues, raise funds and gain members. It’s a novel use of Elgg for a wonderful cause in a country that truly deserves liberty.

You can take a peek at the prototype (in development) here: http://www.juventudelaranja.com/.

Read more about the party here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_Democracia.

Arck Interactive Gives Back

Paul — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:46:53 +0000

UPDATE 4/16/2012: The contest has ended and we’ll be notifying the winner shortly. Thanks to everyone who participated!

We are all about community at Arck. After working with many fantastic organizations and non-profits over the years, and having recently relocated our offices to an incredibly community-focused area, we realize how much organizations give without asking for much in return. This is our chance to give back.

Arck Interactive pledges to donate a customized social networking platform, containing a collection of our open-source and proprietary plug-ins and a custom theme, to an organization or non-profit of the community’s choosing. All you need to do is let us know which organization is the most deserving, why they are the most deserving (as a comment below) and and we will do the rest. If you’re thinking about adding a new organization, put some serious thought into how a social network will add value to their vision. Many organizations do not need this type of technology and we want to see our donation to be put to heavy use.

The donated social network will enable the organization to actively communicate, collaborate and engage existing and new members. People who are looking to get involved in your cause will be able to participate in a thriving social community that could include online giving or fundraising through your platform or ours. Communication is everything, and the networks that Arck is known for have connected hundreds of thousands of people around the world for many purposes. We’re certainly not Facebook (nor do we care to be), but our small team of 6 does make a difference in our own unique way.

The poll will close Monday, April 16th and the organization with the most votes will win.

The rules are simple:

One vote per person.
You must be an authorized representative of your organization, or have permission from an authorized representative of the organization, in order to add your organization to the list. This can’t work if the organizations that are added don’t want or need a social networking platform.

A couple caveats:

We aren’t able to provide hosting on our barebones development VPSs. You should supply your own LAMP-based host and a domain. If you don’t have a host, we’ll help you find one. No sweat, right?
We wish we could provide ongoing support at no cost, but, sadly we have mouths to feed. However, we’re happy to arrange a reduced cost support retainer if that is something the organization will need.
We reserve the right to terminate or modify this contest in any way without notice.
We are already working on a pro-bono project with the Homeless World Cup, so don’t add ‘em.

Cheers!

The Arck Interactive Crew
Paul, Billy, Sam, Ben Fryc, Andras & Ismayil

PLEASE ADD TO THE LIST OF ORGANIZATIONS BELOW

Welcome Ismayil to the development team!

Paul — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:05:36 +0000

Our development squad is now +1 with the addition of Ismayil. We tracked Ismayil down after implementing his excellent hypeAlive plugin on one of our recent projects. Although he’s only been working with elgg for 8 months, he’s already recognized as a solid contributor to the community. You can view his community work here: http://community.elgg.org/pg/profile/ihayredinov.

Please join us in welcoming him!

Arck launches Cubview 2.0 for Loyola High School

Paul — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:09:17 +0000

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Cubview 2.0, based on feedback received from faculty and students during Cubview 1.0′s first academic year in production. The new Cubview makes it easier than ever for students and faculty find out what’s going on at school and stay current. A dramatically streamlined user profile shows the activity they need to know and expect right away. Upcoming assignments are always in the upper right and filtered by context, showing either all assignments across classes, or assignments for a specific class if the student or teacher is viewing that classes group page.

All menu items are located in a persistent, context-sensitive, left hand side navigation. Folks can check their news feed, groups, files and messages all from one menu. Groups use the same left-hand navigation, making it easier to get around.

Sports teams and followers also get all of the info they need. View upcoming games, track scores and get highlights all from the team’s new streamlined page.

And best of all, it’s faster. A lot faster.

Read the case study and sign up for a demo accocunt here

An historic Friday at Arck

Paul — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:52:38 +0000

It was a wonderful Friday here at Arck Interactive. We were officially approved as a development vendor for the World Bank. Starting next week, we’ll be developing custom social networking functionalty to improve the information architecture of their internal Elgg-based social network.

We completed the third release of our private social networking application dubbed “The Vine” and secured five new customers.

We signed genius Mr. Ben Tomlin, Communications Director for Loyola Highscool, on as the third partner in our new venture, Arckware LLC. We’ll be working together to develop a bleeding-edge SaaS based online classroom environment.

Progress.

Suggested hardware and hosting requirements for large Elgg sites.

Paul — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:45:25 +0000

Overview
As the popularity of Elgg grows, we’re getting more and more questions regarding the optimal hosting environment for large networks. We’ve created this post in response to that. It contains a growing, consolidated list of suggested hosting and hardware requirements for running large (5k+ user) Elgg installations. It’s based on community contributed best practices, Elgg’s documentation and Arck’s experience with the platform over the past two years. It’s intended to be used as a point of reference and makes no claim of being all-inclusive. If you have a suggestion or edit, please include it in a comment and we’ll review it for inclusion in the next version.

Many thanks to the Elgg community for all of the input contributed across Elgg forums and mailing lists.

OS / Software Requirements

Dedicated LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL 5+, PHP 5.2+) based server
Apache mod_rewrite module and multibyte string support
GD for graphics processing
JSON (included in PHP 5.2+)
memcached (100-150MB of RAM allocated)

Hardware Requirements

CPU: Quad 3ghz+
RAM: 4GB+
HDD: 1-2TB+ / SSD (Disk space can be estimated by multiplying the amount of space you wish to allocate to each user by the total number of users. This could range between 10MB and 100MB depending on your requirements.)

Optimizations

MySQL

Convert the following MySQL tables to the InnoDB engine: elggannotation, elggentities, elggentity_relationships, elggmetadata, elggmetastrings, elggusers_sessions.
Leave all remaining tables as MyISAM for FULLTEXT searching
Raise the InnoDB buffer size to utilize roughly 50% of your total RAM.
Add OPTIMIZE queries to a nightly cron for all Elgg tables

PHP

Increase the total amount of memory allocated to PHP from 8MB in PHP’s configuration file. We recommend at least 16MB.
Change the maximum uploaded file size in PHP’s configuration to at least 2MB.

Scripts

Minify all JS and CSS
Serve JS and CSS from separate sub-domains (i.e. css.yourhost.com and js.yourhost.com)

Plugin Execution Order

Plugins are loaded in the order they appear on the plugin administration page. The theme plugin should be loaded near the bottom of the list, as it applies styles to other plugins.

Load Testing
The hu_skawa_genusers Elgg plugin can be used to simulate any number of concurrent users on an Elgg site. We recommend volume testing using this plugin in combination with http_load, or any other load testing tool.

Load Balancing
For large Elgg sites, it is critical to isolate the database(s) from the web server. In a load-balanced configuration (see typical example below) the web servers are horizontally scalable. The load balancing technology could be an appliance from a known vendor like Cisco, Big IP, etc or simply a Linux host implementing the Linux-HA project.

At the database layer the simplest solution is an active passive approach with enough hardware horsepower to handle the expected query load. Load and volume testing is required in order to determine that is needed in your own environment. Additionally, a true active/active database cluster could be implemented at a higher cost using a commercial clustering solution from MySQL.

elgg load balanced configuration

Arck’s first pro-bono project: A global social intranet for the Homeless World Cup. Made with love and Elgg.

Paul — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:52:43 +0000

We’re ecstatic to announce the start of our very first pro bono project: a global social Intranet for our favorite non-profit organization, The Homeless World Cup. We’ll be using the popular open-source social platform, Elgg, to create a hybrid content management system/social network that will be used to connect the organization’s 70 global partners. The network will enable central communication and allow the organization to share best practices, files, photos and other media to help develop internal projects across the globe.

For those who are unfamiliar with the event, The Homeless World Cup is an annual, international football tournament, uniting teams of people who are homeless and excluded to take a once in a lifetime opportunity to represent their country and change their lives forever. It has triggered and supports grass roots football projects in over 70 nations working with over 30,000 homeless and excluded people throughout the year.

Arck launches public Elgg-based social network demo: Kyoutsuu

Paul — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:08:28 +0000

Kyoutsuu is a basic example of what’s possible with Elgg, an open-source social networking framework, and Arck Interactive, a team of talented web designers developers. Elgg provides the building blocks that allow you to create and grow your own social networking site, whether publicly (like Facebook) or internally on a networked intranet (like Microsoft Sharepoint).

Arck provides a full-range of custom design and development services for Elgg and offer options for either hosting your social network with us, or on your own server. You can view a fill list of our Elgg services and case studies for social networks we’ve developed with Elgg on our web site.

Please register for a free account and play in our sandbox. If you have any questions, or feedback, click the little Feedback tab on the left side of the web page and we’ll get back to you soon!

By the way, kyoutsuu means community or commonality in Japanese.

What’s possible with a free, open-source social networking framework called Elgg? The Wiley Faculty Network, for one.

Paul — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:00:59 +0000

We’ve been using the open-source social framework Elgg on nearly all of our social development project over the past two years. Never heard of Elgg? I’m not surprised. It hasn’t been given the attention or the visibility that it absolutely deserves. Hands down, it’s the best framework for developing custom social networks.

That said, I’d like to share our latest Elgg development effort, a faculty network for John Wiley & Sons, that we developed in cooperation with Garfield Group Interactive.

The Wiley Faculty Network is a global community of faculty, connected by a passion for teaching and a drive to learn, share, and collaborate. Members connect to collaborate with colleagues, join professional and peer groups, find mentors, attend virtual and live events, and view a wealth of resources all designed to help them grow as educators.

Site functionality included: one-click login integration with Wiley’s existing faculty system ProfVal; role-based access with custom profiles; intelligent dashboard widgets that suggest content to users based on their professional and personal interests; a custom content management system plugin allowing Wiley to deliver context and discipline specific content to users; a complete events management system; custom file/resource (documents, videos, audio) sharing; granular analytics and reporting; blogs, user groups and forums.

You can read the complete case-study on the Arck Interactive site, here:

http://www.arckinteractive.com/work/wiley-elgg-development/index.php.

The live Wiley Faculty Network web site is available here:

http://wfn.wiley.com/home